American restaurant chain Waffle House has become a metric for storm impact

There are plenty of ways that scientists and government agencies use to measure how powerful a storm is, but apparently one of the best (although informal) ways is to check out your local Waffle House.

For Canadians who aren't familiar with the restaurant chain, Waffle House is nearly as ubiquitous in the southern and southeastern United States as Tim Horton's is here at home, and they've spread into the US Northeast and Midwest as well. As their name implies, they specialize in breakfast, with burgers, sandwiches, steaks and chili rounding out the menu for later in the day, and there's a heavy emphasis on 'comfort' food. Since these restaurants are open 24 hours a day, all year long, and are spread throughout the regions of the United States that are typically hit with the worst hurricanes and tornado outbreaks, they've become an excellent measure for just how much storm damage a region has suffered.

The Waffle House Index was developed by W. Craig Fugate of FEMA, the US's Federal Emergency Management Agency, giving three index levels — green (open with full menu), yellow (open with limited menu) and red (closed). Given that the company apparently has one of the best disaster preparedness programs in the country, with a fleet of portable generators and staff trained in disaster management to keep locations open as much as possible, Fugate was really on to something here. Just by checking in with all of the locations in a storm-damaged region, he could tell exactly what areas had power, gas and even where the roads were accessible.

As of 2012, it's become standard practice for Waffle House locations to email FEMA directly with their status during a storm, and apparently they've even started to run storm-tracking programs to predict when restaurant locations will be impacted by a storm.

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The Waffle House Index isn't perfect, of course. In areas of widespread damage, such as from a hurricane, major flooding or even an earthquake, it can be quite useful for telling how much response an area needs. However, when it comes to the more focused damage from a tornado, it doesn't work quite as well. An example used by Popular Science is the 2011 Joplin tornado, which caused incredible damage to the town, but left both Waffle House locations there untouched.

This year has been a very light one for tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic, despite how it looked earlier this year. That's a good thing, of course, given the alternative, and the predictions that the storms we see in years to come will be bigger and more powerful due to climate change. So, it's a good thing that metrics like this — however informal — are in place so that people can get the help they need after these storms take their toll.

(Photo courtesy: Barry Williams/Getty Images)

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